Its cloudflare trying to enshittify the internet with micro transactions[0] and take their N% cut (of course it will start at like 2% but ask any uber driver how thats going).

The problem is the arguments they make for why this should happen are quite compelling, especially to those running sites (you'll see plenty of complaints on this forum about it), but theres also a large group of people who think information / code / data should be "free" (see open source code/maps/anything you can think off). So really its just a moral debate that will be lost in the interest of profit (which is ya know good n bad, if AI companies did more caching we probably wouldn't need this, but here we are).

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ai-crawl-control/